Thu, 19 May 2005

prowl
I was walking to the office. I was going to get the mail, and to make a phone call I didn’t want to make from my phone. I saw a white cop SUV prowl up the block, the spotlight honed in on a trailer with all lights out, and the SUV slowed to a stop, blocking the driveway, and that’s when i heard the first shot. I’ve heard about three or four gunfights since I moved in, in the dark, early in the morning, but this was the first time I had ever seen one, and so I ran up toward the SUV to get a better look. I don’t understand why I did this, except that I was writing a book then, and one of the scenes was like this, and I knew if I could see it all, could sift out the hidden telling details, the scene would work. Between the trailer and the garage was a narrow alley, not an alley, there’s a word for it. It sounds like throughfaire, but that’s not it. That’s where the guy was, hidden behind a bush, and I saw the muzzle flash as his shot hit the SUV, which was reinforced so that the paint chipped off in a lopsided circle, and some sort of pink plastic had shattered but not given up the gunmetal steel beneath. The driving cop slumped down low in his seat, so that I thought he had been hit, but he took two shots into the not-alley, one hitting the garage and splintering the wood, the other catching the gunman somewhere, I couldn’t see, as the spotlight had yanked up toward the sky as the driver dropped down. The cop riding shotgun jumped out and hid behind the front tires, taking a shot around the grill, which put down the gunman, and then turned around to face me, and screamed something like “get on the ground”, or maybe just “on the ground”, and I asked him what was happening, and was going to walk closer to see him, to find out if there was something in his features I would need to know, but my body gave itself up and I fell toward the pavement.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #